The present invention generally relates to a backup and recovery using a storage system in a cluster environment.
The introduction of globalization and online business operations in recent years has made it preferable for corporate information systems to operate continuously 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year. As a technology for achieving this, there is clustering technology. In general, clustering technology makes the resources of an information system, such as a server and storage system, redundant, and increases availability so that even when a failure occurs in one portion of the information system, it is possible to continue carrying out tasks on this information system by using the resources that have not been affected by the failure. Clustering technology comprises a local cluster that shares data in common, and a remote cluster, which replicates data and holds the data redundantly in different apparatuses. As a result of redundancy, clustering technology comprises a plurality of the same resources in each information system. This increase in resources is a problem since it consequently makes a user do complex settings. With respect to this problem, for example, the prior art of US Patent Publication No. 2004/0181707 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Literature 1) makes it possible to set a replication (explained below) that makes the contents of data in a plurality of storage systems match by specifying a cluster-targeted server in a remote cluster environment in which both servers and storage systems adopt a redundant configuration.
Alternatively, a corporate information system implements a backup in preparation for the destruction and loss of data resulting from an operational error or equipment failure. A backup refers to the replication of data that is utilized in the corporate information system. Since data replication places a huge work load on a computer, replication technology is used to reduce this load. As replication technology prior art, there is US Patent Publication No. 2009/0055613 (hereinafter referred to as Patent Literature 2). In Patent Literature 2, the computer does not replicate the data, and instead the storage system replicates data that is in a storage area of this storage system to another storage area.